Startup promotion and content marketing

The main thing that a young start-up should protect himself from is the statistics of unsuccessful projects. The data varies, but almost all of them are capable of causing a slight bout of depression in particularly impressionable entrepreneurs. It is possible that this is the first test, a startup initiation, which filters those who are not enough determination.

In the first three years, 44% of startups are closed. Such disappointing data leads the University of Tennessee in a 2015 study. And this is the most "good" statistics that I found.

Why are startups closing down? There are many reasons. For example, a young entrepreneur comes up with an excellent (as it seems to him) idea that is not “packaged” into a business. There are a lot of similar examples. The idea so fascinates the creator that he does not see the obvious: the impossibility of implementing a business model in the current market conditions. “It should work!” He desperately convinces himself, and sometimes investors. The project starts, but does not bring money. “But now there is experience!” - so it seems, they say, after the project is closed?
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And it happens that someone who is inspired by a successful case of a foreign (most often) company creates something similar, mistakenly believing that “the idea decides everything”. This overlooks the huge underwater layer of the work of developers, marketers, call center and other "fighters of the invisible front" in the vast infrastructure of the existing company, not to mention the features of the market.



These typical mistakes are visible to experienced investors already at the pitch stage. There are methods for testing the hypotheses of value provided, market research, many articles have been written about this, but you cannot figure it all out.

Organizational and managerial problems, lack of managerial skills, a start-up team are, perhaps, the most common cause of failure.

A startup looks like a minefield where there is a risk of exploding without a map. Particularly loud claps are obtained in the marketing territory.

Strategy

The creator of a new project on the Internet is entering the environment (market) on which it plans to earn. For this, you need to understand what will be offered to whom. Do not rush to say "Thank you, Cap!". For all the time I worked with startups (as a full-time marketer or independent consultant), I had to see an unusual situation where the company’s founder considered one as the main product and the marketing director as the other. The worst thing is that the sales department tried to sell at the same time - the third! Interestingly, it was in this sequence that the startup product materialized from a certain abstraction (we sell freedom!), To a specific piece of iron in a beautiful package. This is an interesting point to reflect on what level of management ideas translate into revenues and why sales and marketing departments are not always friendly. But let's not get distracted!



The marketing strategy should be clearly spelled out in the form of a document that can be edited in the future, but it should be a DOCUMENT, at least to remind you what we create and for whom. This is a map indicating the path of the company at different stages of development.

In this document, among other things, must be:

clear understanding, description, formulation of the product and its unique characteristics;
company goals;
positioning;
audience and its segments.
Only after working through these basics, you can choose which channels you will use, what budgets you will need, etc. etc.

In accordance with the model of Stven Blanc from his book “Four Steps to Illumination”, in the development of a startup, there must be a consumer verification stage, when all the hypotheses of the marketing strategy are tested. At this stage, you can get the first customers, and you can return to the development of a marketing plan.

But can we plan some kind of marketing activity in advance?

Content marketing

The concept of a “startup” has a lot of definitions, I like it owned by Eric Reese: “A startup is an organization that creates a new product or service in conditions of high uncertainty.” Usually, we have a new product on the Internet, high risks and an incomprehensible market. Under these conditions, content marketing is the channel, or rather the approach that can be called universal, and which is necessary even without calculating the usual parameters (depth of the channel, cost of the visitor, conversion).

“A startup is an organization that creates a new product or service under conditions of high uncertainty.”

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of content with independent value for the desired audience. In order to use something new and incomprehensible (from the point of view of the consumer, this is any startup), you need:

• Take an interest in this;
• Know how to use it.

The first item refers to the birth of a marketing funnel (increased knowledge of the product), which gradually takes your consumer to the shopping mall. The second point is educational materials that are packaged in the most interesting and unobtrusive form for the audience.

Both requests are met through content marketing - the most accurate solution for promoting new or complex products.

Email marketing

In a broad sense, the scope of content marketing includes many independent promotional tools, including email marketing. The automatic series of training letters that a new user receives after registering with the service or trigger mailings is also content marketing, which can be called a mandatory program of any Internet service. There are many companies on the Internet that communicate very effectively and beautifully with the consumer through mailings.

In the future, email marketing will bring your customers back to your project, but that’s another topic.

Publications

Of course, publications on platforms with a predominance of the target audience, training videos and other materials that will make life easier for future customers at different stages of the sales funnel are important.

Publications attract attention, increase awareness, provide the necessary level of communication with the market and the consumer, are an essential element of SEO, create an expert level for a brand, etc. The list of advantages of placing publications is very large, and the disadvantage is one. You need a very good quality of work. This is not so much about the perfect text in terms of grammar, spelling and even style. A good publication in the framework of content marketing is the ability to write without advertising, to understand the common task and to be well versed in the specifics of the product.

In this sense, you can understand those founders of complex services who do not dare to work with freelancers or content agencies. But then, we have to admit that all the articles should be written exclusively by the startups themselves. The interview author’s interview with a person who, at a minimum, knows the content of the marketing strategy, helps to get out of this problem (see above). We, for example, always request a part of this strategy, which becomes the basis for a content marketing strategy.

Blog and social networks

I intend to unite these two channels here, because in a startup, as they say in romantic films, it is better for them to be together.

The company's blog is another opportunity to be interesting for its audience, which means attracting it and building loyalty. At the same time, a blog allows you to use technical marketing opportunities, such as remarketing lists, promotion of newsletter subscriptions, content optimization for search engines, etc.

A bunch of blog and social networks works, for example, like this: you publish a post on a topic that is interesting to your consumer and is related to the product. Link to the post is placed in social media, and, in different iterations (text on Facebook, infographics in interest, photography in instagram ...). The same link is sent to the weekly newsletter. During the entire time, the remarketing code collects data from the blog about visitors who you are using closer and closer to your product with the help of targeted advertising in social networks.

As a result, you are growing traffic from social networks and search, conversion of readers into subscribers, the credibility of the brand as an expert.

findings

Any startup is a story about business. The ending of the story can be happy and not so. You can minimize the risks, having the necessary information about the market, an intelligent team and sufficient resources. Startup marketing implies the exact following of the strategy, but at the initial stage it is possible to prepare the basis for a decisive start. If some channels and tools can be selected, counted and predicted only after creating a strategy and testing, then content marketing is a universal approach that every startup needs, due to its characteristics as a business (first of all, novelty). Content strategy can be created with the product, and it will be its first engine on the market.